This play only makes sense if someone is extracting the actual currency value of a Bitcoin somewhere along the line.
If that value is going to me as the consumer, it's a terrible trade because it's taking the electricity that's gone through the most conversion losses from me in the place where it's most valuable. I might as well buy Bitcoin elsewhere. If some of that value is going to the chipset manufacturer or a middleman like 21, it's a straight up scam where somebody is stealing the electricity I put into my phone.
An HSM for Bitcoin wallets in a phone makes a small degree of sense to me, a mining ASIC makes none whatsoever.
I would think that's the very point. And it's not like there wasn't a precedence in the physical world already.
Stamps.
I still remember when stamps were occasionally used as a fractional currency. You could order small things over mail and send payment as stamps.
This phenomonenon was even used by Terry Pratchess as a minor plot detail in Going Postal, and subsequently in Making Money. The idea was dead simple: stamps had real value. Eventually, someone would need to spend it to actually mail things, but until then people could use them as a form of microcurrency. So a single unit might be "spent" several times in unofficial transactions before getting used for its intended purpose. The stamps weren't any more valuable as such, but their added utility made them useful in a wider setting.
There's some talk about the history in [0], and slightly better researched in [1].
0: http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=16067
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_currency_%28United_S...
EDIT: one more, this time something recent and still practiced - pre-paid call time as currency: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569744...
Without you having to do anything but pay for and power a dedicated chip. If the utility of having a tiny amount of BTC on device is so high, and the cost so low, why not just have the device manufacturer pre-load a lifetime supply on the device (purchased or mined in a giant wind powered data center)? Seems the cost of this buying this chip is much higher than just buying the BTC outright for the user.
People walk around with extra apps on their phones consuming battery life all the time. If a user was presented with an option to turn on some hardware in their phone that gave them all sorts of interesting additional functionality and at the same time were warned that it would decrease the battery life of their phone by 1 or 2 percent then I think you have a viable proposition.