On a bug report page such as this one, there is no indication that the bug's status or importance are changeable unless you happen to be mousing over the status or importance area, which is rather unlikely, since even when combined they occupy only a tiny fraction of the visible area of the page (1.2 % on my screen).
What should happen: A bug's status and importance should look changeable without mousing over them, though without cluttering the table either.
One part of fixing this could be to introduce a standard borderless icon across Launchpad for "Click on this to change it", replacing the current pencil-in-a-circle (and thereby probably fixing bug 287154 too).
Another part of fixing this could be to introduce a standard text format across Launchpad for "Click on this to change it", such as a dotted underline.
And one way of reducing clutter while still having the icons visible all the time would be to line up the icons horizontally, instead of having them staggered based on the length of the current status/importance value.
I'm in favour of the borderless icon.
The standard visual idiom for something that is changeable inline is that it is formatted like a normal link but coloured green. The problem is that for status and importance we use colour coding to match the values.
We've tried lining the edit icons up, and it looked bad and appeared too far away from the value, so I don't think we should do that.