I'm not sure if this is a Thunar issue or an Xfdesktop issue. On dragging an item from a Thunar window to the desktop, I get the Copy mouse cursor, but the item moves instead of copying. Drags from the desktop into a Thunar window copy, and show the copy cursor, which is the same behavior as in Xfce 4.8.
Marking duplicate, but yes drag and drop still needs more work. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 9142 ***