It's not about saying "we have 8"

It's about setting out some rules which define what is and isn't a planet. The number of planets we have will come FROM that.

The IAU have set a few rules.

Orbit the sun (fair enough...but this eliminates inter-solar and extra solar bodies)
Big enough to make itself round (a reasonable benchmark for size...approx 800-900km size...without just saying X km)
Has cleared it's neigbourhood.

AWOOOOOOOOOOOGAH>..... THAT is where the entire thing falls apart. Tunguska and SL9 show us that neither Jupiter nor Earth have 'cleared their neigbourhood'. It's clear that the IAU didn't want to classify Ceres, Pluto, Charon and UB313 as planet for whatever reason and desperately tried to think of SOME clause which would rule them out...unfortunately, what they came up with ruled out most of the planets in our solarsystem.

Take out the clean neigbourhood clause - and we have about as sound a planetary definition as one can have. (The current count would be about 12 ) With that clause in place....we have a bad joke - nothing more.

Doug