Look at it this way. If people are buying in game money with real cash it will cause the prices to jump up rather high as (quite a few) people will be willing to pay higher prices for in-game items. What will happen is those who can't afford to or are opposed to buying gold even if from a legit source will be forced to either spend (real) money to be able to buy in-game items, or they will have to spend insane amounts of time farming (more so than now) to obtain the gold or finally not participate in the in-game economy at all. The concept as a whole caters to people who have the real world finances to spend on gold. You don't get additional subs and monthly fees by alienating parts of your player base.
Not to mention that if blizzard were to participate in this concept it would be in their best interests to manipulate the market so that people will have to buy more gold to keep up. Thats just all sorts of ugly in the end.
Lets not forget that taking away from (in many cases) needed time to play will eventually hurt the subscriber base and therefore lose money from subs in the long run. Its a balancing act. Sure selling gold for them would give a quick boost of money but if you can buy 15k gold for that tundra mammoth then why bother making it 15k gold in the first place? Why not make it 50k to jack up the price and encourage people to spend even more cash for it? Why not just sell it for cash and skip the middle man?
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Prices of what? The auction house is completely player controlled, and the prices, at least on my server, are completely out of hand already.
I don't think, at least as of right now, Blizzard would drive up the prices on vendor items just to get people to buy gold. The price of an item like the tundra mammoth is still very high. Based on how much the two pets in the pet store cost, I'd imagine the amount of cash you would need to buy the tundra mammoth would be at least a couple hundred dollars. That's still out of reach to a huge chunk of the player base, and another chunk of the player base would not be willing to spend the money even if they could afford it. Would lots of people do it? I'm sure they would, but I don't think enough would do it to have an impact on the entire server's economy. Blizz cranking up the prices on vendor items would only make said items more out of reach for those people unless they lowered the price of the gold.
We are still, in essence, talking about a vanity item. The tundra mammoth is not needed to progress in the game, and as far as I know guilds don't require it. It is a convenience. Because of that fact, I don't think it would ever be a huge problem. Of course, if they were to start making top-end gear available for real cash, we would have a problem. Based on what's available right now just on the auction house plus vendors, I don't see the big deal with those items flowing freely.
As far as buying gold impacting subscription rates, I don't think it will. We pay by the month, not the hour. I'm sure they would love people to pay them for a subscription and not use it. They still get the money with less strain on the servers.