[exmadscientist]

There's also plenty of unclocked stuff in the FPGA... like the LUTs that do all the work. There's enough of this and it's important enough that I believe thinking of FPGAs as "just state machines" is dumb. But then I also believe that digital electronics are not "just digital circuits", but better thought of as "bistable analog circuits", so what do I know....

[ncmncm]

If the results of the LUTs don't end up clocked into a register, where do they go?

Of course everything is analog, and ultimately quantum-electrodynamic, but the languages FPGAs are programmed in don't provide access to those domains.