Mmmmm...... no.
Well look, it would be cheep enough to try out, wouldn't it, if you already had a suitable drive to test? You'd need to be careful though. There is huge variability in the speed of those drives, and they tend to be very asymmetric, i.e. much faster read than write times. I'm guessing that they are entirely unsuitable. After all, if you pull one open there might be two chips - the storage and a simple controller. It's hardly what you get with a real drive, and certainly not the equivalent of one of those solid-state drives Apple uses in the Air. I am almost certain that your internal drive would have better capacity, transfer rates and inter-file latency, so there would be no point.
Have you even tested your internal drive for field work? I've found on my MB pro I can comfortably record 2 tracks (and I'm sure I could do at least 4) simultaneously while playing back a few more - and that's with a 5400 platter. It's not ideal and I use an external drive for more serious work, but it sounds like this would be worth at least testing for your purposes. With a higher capacity drive you could even have a separate partition - say of 80G for the purpose - to protect your systems partition from fragmentation. But back to your question, I think a pen drive would be hopeless - but test it and give us feedback. We get a lot of opinions here and not enough results of trial-and-error. You got me curious.