So won't this be confusing, as non-discriminating sites choose to inflate their page views by ignoring whether those were prefetches or real loads?

There are a lot of sites out there that use JavaScript reloads every X minutes to do this sort of thing already. More trackable but I bet they still include those numbers in their media packs ;-)

TechCrunch, for example, has this near the bottom of the source:

    setTimeout('location.reload(true)',1200000);

So that's every 20 minutes.

A more insidious trick to "inflate" your views would be to detect when a tab isn't open but still showing your site and to refresh a lot more often in that case (meaning the user won't notice).