I have a few thoughts here:
- Ethash was designed to resist ASICs, if they are able to break this (not saying its not possible, that would be impressive)
- Bitmain has made some dumb decisions lately: Flash releasing SIA miners? SIA is already talking about forking the coin to drop their miners. Given the large increase in the hash rate - this makes sense because they are putting themselves at risk for a 51% attack.
- PoW is on the chopping block for Etherium anyway... this is not a profitable move for the company, unless of course they have no idea about ETH's plans for Casper implementations.
Anything worth having will motivate people to circumvent any measures put in place to create difficulty to obtain from my point of view ASICs are an annoying thing from the perspective of the little man but they are a sign that it's worth having.
SIA in general has had some odd issues. They wanted to introduce their own ASICs. The fact that they are OK with forking because of Bitmain's products is a bad road to go down and will see some people shy away from it from the centralization aspect. I do see the 51% side although as well.
I am all for PoS coming into play for ETH. The F3 might speed up the process on the ETH dev side for PoS movement but only time and announcements will tell.