The wires count seems to be the number of conductors in the cable (i.e. the number of wires you'll find if you cut a cable in half, including ground and power).
It's true that the actual data is sent over a lower number of diffpairs.
I suspect the shield is not included in the number of wires, since all USB cables have a shield (not sure if usb 3.0 has an extra return ground wire for high speed).