Thunderbird has a folder-based organization, so out of the box can it only group mails per folder. What you want is a GMail-view/organization, where all mails are in one folder. But this will probably not work well with bigger amounts of mails, because Thunderbird is not optimized for this, especially when the mails are on a remote server.
Which one do you use? I'm really curious if there's an alternative workflow that is just as good as GMail-view, or people just learn to accept the limitations.