As per the online help, the aligning tool's "Align as Row" performs:
Aligns all of the components on their centers as a row, and will add padding between them that you can select.
This means that if you have several objects that are located in different Y axis positions, using this tool means as well as spacing them horizontally it will also move them vertically until they all share a common center point on the Y axis.
I feel that this goes against every other drawing package that I have used where an X-axis tool only affects the objects in the X-axis.
Having the Align as Row affect the Y axis also makes no sense given you also have available the full suite of Align Top, Align Bottom and Align Centers Horizontal tools, so there is no need for the spacing tool to perform the extra action of aligning the object centers.
And finally, while the behavior is mentioned in the online help, no indication is given in the tool itself that the Y axis will be manipulated - thus IMHO breaking the UI design goal of the principal of least surprise
So what is the rationale behind this odd behavior?