Butterfly Labs is shipping real products. I personally own multiple units of their first gen product, the "Single". Many in the Bitcoin community own them as well: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=70611.msg813386#msg8...

That said, when Butterfly Labs pre-announced their Singles, it is true that many thought it was a scam... until they delivered.

Did the performance and power consumption live up to the expectations?

They claim 832 Mhash/s at 80W for the Singles. And, yes, my units match these characteristics.

It is worth pointing out that before they had a Single prototype, 6 months ago, they had pre-announced 1000 Mhash/s at 20W... which turned out to be off by 5x in terms of Mhash/Joule. I think there is a fair chance that this ASIC pre-announcement will also fail to reflect the actual numbers. By how much? Who knows.