While the numbers are exaggerated, a widget that costs a small amount compared to what it would bring in has already been created. It's called an ASIC. At the time pre-orders were taken, the smallest unit cost less than 30BTC, and if ONLY 1 was made and there was NO competition, it would have brought in more than 400BTC in 12 months. Therein lies the rub... there will be competition and no one will make just one.
Thus everyone projected how much competition BFL would have between October of 2012 and January of 2013. The proejction was zero, they were the only vendor planning to ship. Then it was a simple matter of when you ordered your BFL product as to when you would get it. Instead, BFL was 3rd (out of 3) to deliver. Both ASICMiner and Avalon batch 1 deployed first, thus reaping large rewards.
If we step into fantasy world though, we now have every unit capable of making such incredible returns... the ~4600 BTC for every mini-rig becomes 61,333. The network increase since those preorders is now at over 600TH. That's 400 minirigs. That would mean 24,533,200 BTC would have been produced in a single year and if we went to Inaba's farcical numbers that would be well over 72million. In less than 4 months at todays rate the entire BTC supply would have been exhausted.
No, most people here realize that mining is a zero sum game and that they are competing with all other miners. There are lots of noobs drawn in by the April bubble who probably can't find their ass with both hands. I am sure they have no idea about how mining works, but thankfully most of them are not on these forums.
THIS is the problem with your "I'd take the 400 BTC!" and the reason why the difficulty is so high today... since EVERYONE wanted the 400 BTC... no one can have it.
Only early adopters have a shot at it, thus all of BFL land went from the catbird seat to negative return. Once the hash rate reaches equilibrium, you cannot generate much more than the worth of the device. There are still some efficiencies to be found with over/under clocking etc.
Very true, they did assess the competition, but they failed to assess the quantity ordered. Most of the people seem to think it'd be just like the B1 Avalons and they'd have had BTC raining down on them.