If you already have a gaming rig with high end GPUs it's not a waste, a friend of mine was running Folding@home 24/7 on his "old" PC which had crossfired Radeon HD 5750s until I told him about btc.
Now it's mining and when he's at work he has his main PC with Radeon 7970 x2 is mining also. It makes him about $11 a day at the current exchange rate (it's sunk a little in the past couple weeks..) Since he already had all this hardware for gaming he's just accumulating money with it all, it's not a worthy "pay for itself" type of investment but since he's getting US$~70 a week for leaving the machines on, it's not a lost cause. his electricity is included in his rent so this is just basically a money machine for him.
the only company that's pitching ASIC machines to regular consumers was looking a bit foul for a while (selling preorders and winding up being cornered into revealing they didn't have a prototype) but they do finally seem to be shipping the 5 GH/s rigs that have been preordered.
https://products.butterflylabs.com/