It's important people realize that a lot of payment providers don't like accepting payments up front for something that does not yet exist. Paypal for instance clearly states that's not allowed.
While I think it's great that crowdfunding is very accessible as of lately, I think there's a risk here of people half assing things, not following through on their end with the product development, and it going south really quickly.
It's against most networks' (Visa, etc) TOS to charge before the goods are shipped, but you can usually word things in such a way to get around it, and it's usually not enforced strictly until it becomes a real problem. It's definitely higher risk than paid-on-shipment though.
However, you'll find that the Lockitron guys aren't charging cards until shipment, just getting the preapproval to do so when they're ready to ship. I suppose that means either they have some other funding or means to get it (with nearly $2m in "pledges", it shouldn't be hard to secure a loan for the first run if they need it if they don't want to go the VC route)
So this solves a slightly different problem than Kickstarter, since the people doing preorders aren't providing working capital. Still, it shows that Kickstarter got enough traction that continuing to fly under the radar wasn't possible, or the chargeback rates on preorders was way too high.
While I think it's great that crowdfunding is very accessible as of lately, I think there's a risk here of people half assing things, not following through on their end with the product development, and it going south really quickly.