(Arguments that destroy all of my points in 3...2...1...)
Wouldn't wanna disappoint
The car itself is great. Well made, reliable, fuel-efficient, roomy, etc. The image attached to it, as daan says, is what I hate about it. Celebs buy a Prius to show off to everyone their green-ness, and then after making a public appearance in the Prius they arrive back home to their fleet of Land Rovers and private jets. It's disgusting.
Agreed. Celebs who do this are hypocrites. That said, I'm not sure how many celebs even own a Prius any more. It doesn't seem to get mentioned as often as it once did.
And the reality is, fuel efficiency does not equal green. It just means the car takes longer to burn its fossil fuels. And those that take emissions and such into account still don't realize that the Prius is actually bad for environment because of the way its batteries are made.
I started off agreeing with this too, but you cocked it up with the last line.
You're right - ultimately, the "greenest" thing to do is not drive at all. If you're driving a car, even a Prius, you're still contributing to pollution (albeit a negligible amount these days), CO2 (the value you put on that depends on your stance on climate change) and you're still using up the world's oil resources (again, the importance of this depends on how close you believe we are to peak oil, though I can't see gas prices going anywhere but up from now on).
However, using less gas is undoubtedly a good thing, and ultimately using less gas means less of the other things too.
The comment about batteries is pretty dubious though. A popular one to bring up is that awful-looking nickel mine in Canada, but I recall that image was debunked quite a while ago as it had been opened a good two decades before the Prius even existed, rather than specifically to make batteries for cars.
The other aspect to that is the levels of hypocrisy involved when complaining, on the internet, about a car using rare earth metals, when laptops, desktop computers, phones and anything else that accesses the internet all use huge quantities of rare earth metals, and have done for far longer than we've had hybrids.
My last quip with the Prius is while many buy it for the fuel economy alone, there are better cars out there for that. If you really care about the planet, sacrifice the creature comforts and get yourself a SEAT Ibiza Ecomotive. 88 mpg and 1000 miles on a single tank, and excellent emissions as well.
Hmm.
Few caveats to this. Firstly, I've always managed to get closer to official figures when driving hybrids than I have in diesels, which in some cases have been up to 20mpg off - and anyone who knows me knows I drive pretty economically (not slow, just economically). So you can chuck that 88mpg in the bin (I'm pretty sure that's the car's "extra urban" figure too, rather than its combined figure) and pitch it around the 60-65mpg mark for a realistic number (or actually,
59mpg according to the Honest John fuel economy register).
59mpg is only
3mpg better than people are getting from the Prius - and the Prius's claimed economy is 10mpg lower than the Seat. Plus, it's a bigger, more spacious car, and it's easier to drive because it's an automatic. And since it uses petrol and not diesel, it's cheaper to run too. And almost
certainly more reliable.
So it's not
really more economical in actual usage. Nor, as you claim, is it dirtier. Petrol engines burn inherently cleaner than diesel ones do, and they don't need expensive and unreliable diesel particulate filters either (nor urea injection systems, if you live in the U.S.).
DPFs have a nasty habit of clogging up if you use the car exclusively in town (incidentally, an environment in which hybrids destroy diesels for economy), so every so often you need to go for a blast, in which scenario they burn all the soot and release it as marginally less nasty ash. Ever seen a brand-new diesel Audi or similar kicking a big cloud out the back when they accelerate hard? Hardly clean, is it?
Diesels sometimes have a lower CO2 output than petrol cars, but that's misleading as on a mile-per-gallon basis diesel puts out more CO2. This means you need to make the diesel even more economical to put its CO2 on the same level as that of a hybrid. Better economy is great - but we've already established some of those ultra-economical diesels suck at actually getting the correct figures in real driving.
the Prius is not the last word in fuel economy like so many take it to be.
Actually, in America, it pretty much
is. The two most economical non plug-in cars sold in the U.S. are both Prii - the regular car, and the Prius C.
Unfortunately, ignorance is also rife on the anti-Prius side.
Buying one because they are supposedly "green" = makes you a hypocrite.
There are quite a few other cars that can get just as good or better mileage.
Covered this above
That's what I get for assuming there would still be a car out there with similar attributes. 
Habits...
