Yes, mining equipment purchased now is very likely to cost more to run than it will earn within 6 months... so when you get it you essentially have a few months to hopefully return a profit or you won't. If you paid for the equipment with fiat (dollars), then your odds of ROI are increased as the BTC price increases. If you paid for it with bitcoins, in most cases it will never mine the amount of bitcoins you spent on it.
So it comes down to when you get it, and how much you paid per Gh/s. I have orders from BFL from March that I'm expecting soon (I paid with PayPal), and the $ per Gh/s is still very competitive to new ASIC miners being offered (I ordered before BFL doubled the prices across the board)... and even these machines probably won't ROI without a decent bump in BTC price. If I would have paid for them with Bitcoin, they would most likely never mine the amount of Bitcoins I spent on them (I haven't done detailed enough calculations but I'm betting they won't).
As someone else mentioned, you can look at mining sha256-based alt-coins with ASICs. As the prices fluctuate, they become more or less profitable than BTC so if you mine a coin while it is more profitable than BTC and then exchange it to BTC while it is still more profitable, you've made more than you would have by just mining BTC. If you have a Windows PC you can check out
CGWatcher's Profitability Mining which will automatically mine your most profitable coin, checking however often you set it to. If you setup auto-withdrawal from your pool to a Cryptsy account, and set your Cryptsy account to auto-exchange those coins to BTC, then you've mostly automated the entire process... although you have to make sure you exchange the coins while they're still more profitable than BTC so you have to ensure your pool will payout often enough.
There are pools that attempt to do this all for you, like middlecoin and hashco.ws, but they're for scrypt-based alt-coins. We'll probably see similar sha256-based multipools in the future. But it is not an exact science and with the volatility of alt-coins, there is no guarantee the coin will be more profitable long enough for all this to take place, nor that there will be any buyers when you go to sell... so many people prefer using CGWatcher and handling the exchanging part themselves.
If you want to see how much money you'll lose with your ASIC, plug in the numbers at
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com but you have to watch which month you set as the month you'll start mining, because they adjust difficulty for the entire month on the 1st of that month, which isn't reality - whatever the estimated difficulty increase for that month is isn't the difficulty for the entire month... it increases throughout the month and stops at that amount. So changing the start date even by one month can make a big difference which may not be entirely accurate.
