The 'comment is free' section of the guardian is their freelancer/blog bit. What you're probably seeing is the same author being paid for the same piece from multiple sources. Not all that fishy, just the way freelancing works.
As an abugida versus an alphabet, Thai and English are not that different in structural conception, though Thai has almost double the number of consonants.
The op means: the letters map vaguely to the sounds used to produce them.
Also speaking some Thai, I'm like you unsure this is any kind of useful insight. More useful would be that there's enough Latin alphabet signs in Thailand that all literate Thais can already sound-out English, even if they don't understand it.
I meant that it's not much of a conceptual jump for people with native literacy in abugidas to an English game like scrabble, since the writing system is already really rather similar.
this is a fairly interesting question for you to ask.
i put it to you to think about how you can write a scrabble solver, if you're given the official word list. I don't think it's that much of a step up from a sudoku solver!
