Presumably you have to swallow the thing and then spend 12 hours carrying the receiver device over your shoulder with the electrodes attached all over your skin?
Yes - minor inconvenience, especially as the battery is quite heavy, but somewhat low on the scale of unpleasentness in medical procedures....
I'm sort of surprised they don't design the device with on-board storage, let it capture the images, and then recover it later. Given the current miniaturization of flash memory in microSD cards I would have thought this was feasible. Although there is of course the "failed to recover, flushed down the toilet" scenario to consider...
Flash has a big die size - most of the area of those TSOPs in the receiver is silicon, plus the silicon for compression and error correction. There would also be major power consumption issues with local storage - flash is pretty power hungry.
You want as little as possible in the pill, as this there are more of them and even with a nominally recoverable system you would lose some.
A recoverable system would be viable by simply replacing the capsule casing every time.
Having one expensive receiver isn't a big deal as it's a fixed cost for a virtually infinite set of procedures.
BTW I saw a receiver kit offered second-hand for $12K so I'm guessing maybe $20K new. I bet replacement batteries aren't cheap either.
As these particular pills come apart quite easily, it would be pretty feasible to replace the batteries and reseal it - I wonder if their analysis system has any checks for duplicate IDs... In places where people pay directly and heavily for medical procedures, I'm sure there would be some takers for a discounted second-user one...