Frankly, I don't care who Thai aligns themselves with if they keep their silly award/reward structure in place. They only award you 50% of your actual miles when flying coach. Worse, to redeem miles on Thai is a joke: 95,000 Mileage Plus miles for a US-Asia coach ticket? United (and most everyone else) charges 90,000 for a business class seat.

Granted I hear Thai's trans-Pacific service is quite good (I've only flown them within Thailand so I don't have much to judge them on), but the bottom line is the bottom line.