In my experience it's all marketing/sales statistics.

I care about visitors (unique IPs), if I've had 5 visitors to my website I know that should be 5 different people, the fact that there was 6 gazillion hits is pointless when you understand that _every_ component of a webpage generates a hit, that's the page itself, css/js images etc even the favicon.

page views is however a real number as long as you don't try to serve additional content through html/php pages, or more to the point only count hits against pages rather than additional content.