While it doesn’t mention specific numbers of honor per game, a casual mention from this 2006 interview indicates it took about 2 days of farming to obtain a hwl weapon in the original TBC pre-patch.
6. You ground your characters to Rank 13 - what are your feelings on the new PvP reward system?
Well, it is a bit disheartening to see the rank 14 weapons so easily attainable after spending so much time getting to Rank 13 on all five characters (at the same time). Keep in mind though that in a month people will be replacing them with better weapons anyway so I suppose this really isn’t that big of a deal. If you do the math though to see how amazingly stupid the old system was - I calculated it would have taken me about 1,600 more games of WSG over the next 4 weeks to go from Warlord to High Warlord. I was able to pull in as much as 180,000 honor in a day with endless WSG wins (on non WSG weekends). Now all it takes is about 2 days for a HWL/GM weapon. Given what I knew about the expansion and the fact that I was maximizing crit over raw damage (as many of my spells are instant cast and subject to diminishing returns on +dmg gear) the AB staffs and Benediction suited me just fine.
That said though, I am actually a bit glad that Blizzard has decided to make PvP rewards far more sane. It really was out of hand, the lengths that one had to go to in order to attain the top ranks. I will withhold my judgment on the Arena system until the final numbers are in and the expansion has been released. It seems like a system that is going to reward those who do pretty well and those that do very well nearly the same - which makes sense over rewarding only the top .1% as the old system did. Just don’t lose most of your Arena games or it looks like it will take five or six times as much to attain the same amount of points as those in the upper ranks.