Just an FYI, This is actually because the topic_views table limits the counting to one new view per day, whereas the topics.views field counts allows one new view every 8 hours (by default, but changeable using topic view duration hours). It does include users and anon. 
UPDATE
Turns out the topic_views table isn’t even counting one new view a day… It actually counts the first time someone views a topic and no more views after that. So there’ll only ever be one record per user or IP per topic.