In addition to Undo's fine answer, I would like to explain a bit about the motivation behind the definition.
When Eris was discovered, it turned out to be really, really similar to Pluto. This posed a bit of a quandary: should Eris be accepted as a new planet? Should it not? If not, then why keep Pluto? Most importantly, this pushed to the foreground the question
what, exactly, is a planet, anyway?
This had been ignored until then because everyone "knew" which bodies were planets and which ones were not. However, with the discovery of Eris, and the newly-realized potential of more such bodies turning up, this was no longer really an option, and some sort of hard definition had to be agreed upon.
The problem with coming up with a hard definition that decides what does make it to planethood and what doesn't is that nature very rarely presents us with clear, definite lines. Size, for example, is not a good discriminant, because solar system bodies come in a continuum of sizes from Jupiter down to meter-long asteroids. Where does one draw the line there? Any such size would be completely arbitrary.
There is, however, one characteristic that has a sharp distinction between some "planets" and some "non-planets", and it is the amount of other stuff in roughly the same orbit. This is still slightly arbitrary, because it's hard to put in numbers exactly what "roughly" means in this context, but it's more or less unambiguous.
Consider, then a quantity called the "planetary discriminant" µ, equal to the ratio of the planet's mass to the total mass of other bodies that cross its orbital radius and have non-resonant periods (so e.g. Neptune doesn't count as sharing Pluto's orbit) up to a factor of 10 longer or shorter (to rule out comets, which has little effect in practice). This is still a bit arbitrary (why 10?) but it's otherwise quite an objective quantity.
Now take this quantity and calculate it for the different bodies you might call planets, comparing it to both the objects' mass,

and their diameter,

or with an arbitrary horizontal axis, in order of decreasing discriminant,

Suddenly, a natural hard line emerges. If you look only at the mass and the diameter of the objects (shown in the insets above the plots), then there is a pretty continuous spread of values, with bigger gaps between the gas giants and the terrestrial planets than between Mercury and Eris/Pluto. However, if you look at the planetary discriminant, on the vertical axis, you get a very clear grouping into two distinct populations, separated by over four orders of magnitude. There's a finite set of bodies that have "cleared their orbits", and some other bodies which are well, well behind in that respect.
This is the main reason that "clearing its orbital zone" was chosen as a criterion for planethood. It relies on a distinction that is actually there in the solar system, and very little on arbitrary human decisions. It's important to note that this criterion need not have worked: this parameter might also have come out as a continuum, with some bodies having emptier orbits and some others having slightly fuller ones, and no natural place to draw the line, in which case the definition would have been different. As it happens, this is indeed a good discriminant.
For further reading, I recommend the Wikipedia article on 'Clearing the neighbourhood', as well as the original paper where this criterion was proposed,
What is a planet? S Soter, The Astronomical Journal 132 no.6 (2006), p. 2513. arXiv:astro-ph/0608359.
which is in general very readable (though there are some technical bits in the middle which are easy to spot and harmless to skip), and from which I took the discriminant data for the plots above.
Edit: I must apologize for having included, in previous versions of this post, an incorrect plot, caused by taking data from Wikipedia without verifying it. In particular, the planetary discriminant for Mars was wrong (1.8×105 instead of 5.1×103), which now puts it below Neptune's instead of just below Saturn's, but the overall conclusions are not affected. The Mathematica code for the graphics is available at Import["http://goo.gl/NaH6rM"]["https://i.stack.imgur.com/CQA4T.png"]
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... and, as a final aside: Pluto is awesome. It was visited in July 2015 by the New Horizons probe, which found a world that was much more rich, dynamic, and active than anyone expected, including what appear to be churning lakes of solid nitrogen ringed by mountains of water ice, among other marvels.

(Note the image has been colour-enhanced to bring out the variety of surface materials; the true-colour version of this image is here.) I, personally, don't feel it's at all necessary to 'grandfather' Pluto into the list of planets to really feel the awe at the amazing place it is - it's perfectly OK for it to be a cool place with cool science, that is also not a planet.