Here's my theory: what you've encountered is evidently a bug (or flaw) in Apple's own code, and all you can do is laugh maniacally and forget about it.
To test my theory, I ran my own code, written totally separately and at a different time. It does almost the same thing your code does: it lets the user take a picture, and puts the image into the interface. Here's my code:
I ran my code under Instruments with the Leaks instrument, and guess what? I saw the same issues you did.
Naturally, I then started searching on Stack Overflow, and all of this turns out to be old ground. For example:
UIImagePickerController memory leak on iOS5
Even Apple's own sample code, called PhotoPicker (or Using UIImagePickerController to Select Pictures and Take Photos) has the same leak.