Special gear isn't all that expensive. From a cursory view of the video and a skim of the paper, they're using hostapd, which means that they simply need a wifi adapter with a sufficiently-good driver. Anything with the RTL8188CUS seems to be pretty nice (that's what I'm using in a raspberry pi project, myself).
So - I agree with you that there's a barrier to entry, but it's not that big of a barrier.
So - I agree with you that there's a barrier to entry, but it's not that big of a barrier.