Basically a lease is the same thing as a lease to own. You can own it outright one of three ways:

1) Lease it and then buy out the lease. I can go over in detail in another post the situations where this can actually save you money compared to a loan, but the short explanation is that it's rare and involves having lease rebates that exceed the loan rebates.

2) Get a loan

3) Pay cash

Dealerships want you to either get a loan or lease the vehicle because they make money in the process. Right now for example, GM Financial has a rebate on some vehicles that you get if you get a loan through GM financial. The dealership will tell you to make a minimum amount of payments before paying it off because if it pays off too quickly the dealership will get a letter from the finance institution informing them the loan payed off to quickly and that the dealership must pay back the amount they made writing the loan.

Mathematically the way to have your cake and eat it too is to do the loan and then when your first payment is due to make it big enough to cover all but 3 more payments. That way the principal drops significantly and you pay very little interest over the remaining periods you make payments.

BM me if you have specific questions.