This is why I don't preorder. Even though I thought the WakeMate was interesting, I didn't have anything personally invested, and could just enjoy the story instead. My advice is to not give random people your money in exchange for promises unless you want to grow to hate them.
I have a friend with a hardware startup which has pivoted entirely once, and then has had 1-2 years of delays (on an initial "end of year" shipping schedule, still hasn't shipped).
The $5 pre-order amount didn't really bother me. (I actually ended up deciding the Zeo was better for my needs -- it's fundamentally more intrusive but much more featureful and with their API, potentially fun to hack), so I gave my wakemate to a friend of mine.
My main upset over this is that it reinforces "hardware is hard", which is depressing because I have a hardware product I want to manufacture. I'm going to try to manufacture it in the US (or first world), at least for the initial production run. It's kind of back-burner behind the real startup though, more of a hobby thing.
I'm a bit concerned that YC doesn't work particularly well for hardware startups -- it's not enough money, and hardware is a case where you still do actually need money for things other than staff time. I'd love to see a YC-type incubator for hardware projects which provided value-add on the design for volume production side, parts sourcing, and non-equity financing of production, inventory, and distribution.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with the Zeo, but I really respect the difficulty of task that the Wakemate folks took on. There is a little more intrinsic difficulty than making a website.
"The next batch of units will ship no later July 30th, 2010. Based on your pre-order date (01/19/2010), you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner."
Coincidentally, that was April 1st.
Then in August they said we'd be getting them in September.
In the end, it took overnight shipping to get them to some people by Christmas.
I understand and accepted that it would be ready when it was ready, but I can definitely see how hearing "Soon" for a year would disappoint people.