I'll agree that QA's goal is *not* to ship product. QA's first goal is "to make sure we're shipping what we say we're shipping" and second "to make sure it isn't embarassing". The latter is where the "my goal is not to ship" bit comes from, really - finding a show-stopper (or "heinous") bug is a success because you've prevented an embarassment, not because you stopped the show. This leads to a demand for QA automation that can be run as early as possible in the process so things get noticed sooner when fixes are cheaper.

(And it is a demand - I'm primarily a product and systems engineer, and while I've built our QA automation up fairly far, we really need a full time QA automation lead to take over - but just like everyone who can "code" HTML thinks themselves a developer, every "tester" thinks themselves a QA specialist. I can find developers by networking, though - I don't have the contacts and sanity checks on the QA side, so it is a lot harder.)