As I understand it, Hinton has also referred to capsules as "thought vectors". (I think) a capsule is an encoding of information in a persistent mobile form that allows it to be reused in other contexts / nets / knowledgebases -- like a word2vec word definition vector which contains the scores of the most informative n (principal) component words for the given word.

Another obvious attraction of capsules would be the potential to recognize, tune, and maybe even manually introduce labeled concepts in nets during training -- perhaps enabling one shot learning?