Considering they have a fixed-price system for their IPO and have set the price at a 10 Million market cap, it is relatively cheap for large investors to BUY IT ALL UP before anyone else can get in the game. Investors simply make an estimate on the valuation of Eth. at launch and assume it works a 10 Million market cap is probably a "safe" bet.
This will cause ETH to have the appearance of extreme centralization in initial ownership. Then they have mining... seems to me that this is the soft underbelly and that by the time ETH arrives mining will be a thing of the past.
The problem is opportunity cost. $10 million in Bitcoins today could be $100 million in 2015. I've seen this before with the Trezor wallet which was going for 1 BTC each back when Bitcoin was around $100 and now it's finally shipping at a price of each Trezor costing the customer $650.
By the time ETH becomes liquid the price of everything else may have gone up dramatically. In the long term Ethereum has a strong chance at being in the top 3 but it's also very risky (not in $ but in BTC). I wouldn't think anything of putting $100 into it but $100 in BTC is like giving it stock which might rise faster than what it's traded for.
Having said all of this I do think even at these prices it's likely to ROI even with the inflation. I can see Ethereum easily having a 10 billion dollar market cap a year or two from now if it works (and that is a very big if).
If we can mine it with our CPUs then the best strategy to have minimal opportunity cost is to invest a very small amount in the crowd sale and focus mostly on mining or providing cloud mining services. Bitshares delegates or users can mine it for us and offer an IOU token so that we can just buy our ETH from within Bitshares itself by buying their ETH cloud mining asset.