You seem to be making big assumptions here about how a campaign unfolds. I don't run a particularly exploration-oriented game, but I've run games in which the PCs are travelling through the wilderness, or through the astral plane, and this takes multiple sessions of play without a "trip back to town".In my experience the dead guy usually has to wait until the fight is over and the group makes the trip to town, where in most cases the whole affair takes a few minutes of the time allotted for your gaming session.
This also seems to make assumptions about playstyle, such as that there is no important or intimate connection between a particular player's participation in the campaign, and a particular PC.Of course if the party had an NPC along for moral support, or the dead guy had a henchman or two, the player sitting idle wouldn't be an issue since he could still continue to play only he'd be using a different character.
It's none of my business what you will or won't deal with, but it's wrong to say that PC death is, per se, a natural outcome of the game. That's already asssuming what's at issue, namely, is Raise Dead avaiable? Is there some sort of death flag mechanic like [MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION] suggested? Etc.As I see it, someone complaining about the natural outcome of a game where characters are put in life threatening situations and they fail is the last thing I want to deal with.
There's any number of mechanical and non-mechanical ways of running a heroic fantasy RPG so that PC death is not a natural outcome despite frequent life-threatening situations.