Do you mind elaborating on the supposed political quibbles that would prevent a pthreads-like API from being adopted? Are you are implying that vendors of competing API's would oppose anything pthread-like making its way into the standard?
If you read the minutes they borrow generously from PThreads. But I can imagine some major vendors, like Microsoft, may say, "We have a threading library where PThreads conflicts with how we do threading. Rather than just taking PThreads as a whole, lets look at these issues and come up with a solution that will work reasonably for everyone."
Otherwise you end up with C1x coming out and MS just saying, "This is broken for Windows. Our compiler won't implement it." And just let gcc and Intel pick up the load. Which may be fine for some, but seems counterproductive.
FWIW, Microsoft does not bother with C99 not because they are lazy, but because I honestly never remember C being "the focus" at all: they have been strong backers of C++ since before I started doing Windows development (which itself was back in 1994). They mostly seem to ship a C compiler only because it is often easy to dumb down their C++ compiler to do so (and even then, C++-isms sometimes slip into their C modes).
"""Thanks for submitting this suggestion. I've resolved it as Won't Fix, because we currently have no plans to implement C99 Core Language features. While we recognize that a few programmers are interested in those features, our finite development and testing resources force us to focus on implementing features that will have the greatest impact on the greatest number of programmers, which means C++."""
"""Unfortunately 1) There are many, many more users of the Microsoft C++ compiler than there are of the C compiler; 2) Anytime we do customers discussion and/or solicit feedback the overwhelming response is that we should focus on C++ (especially at the moment C++-0x); 3) We just don't have the resources to do everything we would like. So while we are slowly improving our C-99 support (and we are active in the C-1x discussions) I can't promise we'll add any of these features."""
Fortunately, there exist at least two decent C compilers for Windows that I know of: GCC and ICC. GCC provides the same FOSS compiler available on every other platform, and also allows cross-compiling from FOSS platforms to Windows, which helps when producing cross-platform binaries (to avoid needing to have a Windows system around to build release binaries). ICC doesn't use a FOSS license, and it lags behind GCC, but it does provide a replacement backend for Visual C++, which can make it more usable in some environments. Either one provides much better support for C than the Visual C++ C compiler.
Oddly, that might be the best place to be. If it worked for 50% of the group, there might not be enough votes to get it changed (the 50% can effectively block progress). If it works for nobody, then there's still a chance it can get changed.
And then people wonder why I'm not the guy in the room who is generally not excited about standards.
