I thought I'd let this one lie around for a while before responding.

There are some big issues here relating to how the comparison is made between Mars and Earth:-

1) Are there actually stripes?

The map presentation used is a projection of the globe of Mars. It stretches things in an East-west fashio, especially at mid to high lattitudes. Any random pattern of splotches would look like east-west stripes in this projection. I've done the work of reprojecting to a sphere and it looks largely like a pattern of blotches and irregular circles. Oddly enough, this is what craters would look like.

2) Is the alignment important?

It is suspicious that the alignment is sub-parallel across much of Mars. On Earth, although, foir example, the Mid-Atlantic and East Pacific spreading centres are sub-parallel, they are both extremely sinuous, and other centres, such as the Central Indian Ocean ridge are at 90 degrees. The present spin axis of Mars is very likely to have moved, post-Tharsis bulge development (post-stripe development)

3) Is the pattern anything like Earth?

Well, be careful here, we're talking about a mechanism that may be a bit like plate tectonics - not identical to it. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a comparison to The Earth's well=known magnetic field and stripes, as they would be measured at the same altitude and in the same projection as the Mars features are displayed.

4) Is the distribution of magnetism in the rocks of Mars anything like that on Earth?

Absolutely not. On Earth, we see magnetism in the upper 5-10 km of crust, formed rapidly by cooling as a plate leaves an oceanic spreading centre. Cooling time is much less than 1 million years (magnetic intervals of a few tens of thousands of years duration are preserved in some cases)

On Mars, the magnetisation can be shown to underlie massive craters that would have erased near-surface magnetism. Magnetic modelling also shows that the depth of the magnetic sources is 60-100 km. If we model a process that allows thick crust like this to become magnetised, it would take at least 100 million years to cool to that point (Cooling time goes as the square of thickness). This requires processes at completely different rates and scales than plate tectonics on Earth

Summary

Although the magnetic features on Mars are very interesting (they prove, for example, strong early convection and a core dynamo with magnetic field), they are so different from plate tectonics on Earth that they need to be studied more carefully and properly.

Mars' scientists have a long and painful history of alleging that some process or other is "Earth-like" when they are not. Failure to understand the process on Earth, it's signature, and the differences on Mars lead to amazing howlers:-

At one major Mars conference a Mars scientist who should have known better discussed gravity anomalies on Mars in comparison to those at spreading ridges on Earth. I politely pointed out that on Earth we are seeing DYNAMIC anomalies (those formed by live processes that are maintained by the motion and generation of plates) whereas everything on Mars is now a fossil. On Earth, as soon as a spreading centre stops spreading, it's gravity signature dies with it. The Mars scientist had not understood this when she made the analogy.

Similarly, although I resperct Connerny and Acuna's instrument-building and magnetic field measurement skills, they are not qualified to discuss plate tectonics and rigid-lid convection models for Mars, or Earth. Persisting with a misleading presentation technique such as map-stretching is certainly Bad Science and close to deliberate misrepresentation, IMHO.