Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo').
Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.