Clever, in that it offends/ticks off record numbers of potential customers? I'm not impressed.

Clever in that it has captured hundreds of thousands (millions?) of person-hours of labor. reCAPTCHA is now being used to improve Street View CV and will ultimately contribute to automated driving. We were doing CAPTCHAs before, and reCAPTCHA improved upon that method of human verification. As for people like you that have trouble reading, why not just listen to the audio?

Why not just go somewhere else? If I have no vested interest in the site.

Could be the company performs whatever service better than the competitor and the time spent locating an alternative site would take longer than filling out a reCAPTCHA.

And who's to say that the competitor site won't employ human verification more annoying than reCAPTCHA?

Of course this depends on personal preference, but for me I loathe being asked for my phone number.

The internet is vast. I'll never know if they were better, because I voted with my feet (my mouse anyway).