rails 3: display link as button?

All you have to do is add a :method => "get" to the end of your button_to to get it to be treated like a link

The button_to Way

Using a users_path

<%= button_to "BUTTON: link version", users_path, :method => "get" %>

The CSS Way

Or instead of actually inserting a form into your html (which is what button_to actually does) you could go with the cleaner (from a web design perspective) method and actually just style the link in a way to make it look like a button
This has several benefits

Here is a great article on how to do it and here is a little snippet of that code, really just depends on playing around with the border, padding and background image

a.button {
  background: transparent url('bg_button_a.gif') no-repeat scroll top right;
  color: #444;
  display: block;
  float: left;
  font: normal 12px arial, sans-serif;
  height: 24px;
  margin-right: 6px;
  padding-right: 18px; /* sliding doors padding */
  text-decoration: none;
}

The code comes from the link above. Whichever method you choose should work fine, enjoy!