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Personally, I say buy the previa. Its a nice large minivan with room for lots of passengers, gear, or a sheet of plywood. Sure, it's not perfect, but parts are available in the USA, and given the manual transmission(unavailable on a sienna) I wager you can hypermile it to a higher average than a sienna will give you. I think it might be the best option on the US domestic market.
liteace update:
I tracked down some wheels(steel, unfortunately) from a suzuki samarai in order to get 15" wheels, and a 205-70-15 tire, yielding around 10% RPM reduction with no change in tire width. On our island, at 50mph as the highest speed limit- this yields a 2300 rpm or so, which I am happy with.
before doing this, our best was 34 mpg on a road trip, averaging 60 mph/2800 rpm. It's been cold/snowy ever since, so I haven't gotten comparison numbers for our mpg with the new rpms/tires. I bet we'll be in the 35 or 37 mpg range as summer comes on.
I really like having the extra room to pick up passengers and gear as needed- previously with nothing but 5 seater civics in the fleet, the 8 person capacity is awesome. The van also proved itself capable of around 1500lbs total load. This is something our honda civic just can't do. Efficiently carrying a large load is why I would pick up that Previa- think: mpg/payload. That is the true test.
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