I agree completely, shawnmgraham. Having done some QA and user acceptance testing (and thus had to report and track bugs) for in-house software, I can barely imagine how complex the code needed to run WoW must be, and so that many bugs sounds quite reasonable. And for all we know, 60% of them could be resolved already. I know I personally have seen bugs as minor as a mob halfway inside a tree, so something like that would probably be tracked in the database, while still having little or no impact on the way anyone plays the game. Not a top priority, certainly.
So many questions unasked, let alone unanswered here ...

Of those 180,000, how many have an effect on game play?

Are the "bugs" in their tracking system active bugs that need to be fixed, or does that 180k include every bug ever reported?

How many are bugs that have been fixed?

How many are "bugs" that were reported by players but were not reproducible by Blizz?

How many are things like this: while auto-attacking with melee weapon X, if you activate trinket Y, then the auto-attack graphic does not complete the swing even though the hit is recorded and correct damage is done? Is there an entries in their bug tracking database for every weapon and trinket combination that causes this?

Why would a GM have anything to do with this? I can see them possibly adding a bug report, or searching the DB to see if a player complaint has already been reported. A GM is a customer service position. Customer service deals with customers, not bug tracking.
Also note, the number of GMs and customer service reps needed doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of bugs. While they do get bug reports from customers, most of the time they are likely just recording them and passing them on to the developers and QA testers. I expect that they spend a lot of time dealing with hacked accounts and loot issues etc etc etc, and those are probably NOT bug-related.