Sakura was, admittedly, handicapped in this regard by virtue of her second-class, console-only status in SF4.
I think that it's a little too early to jump to conclusions, as buzz will always feature new characters, especially before the game has even been released. It's also true that a character's popularity is directly affected by their in-game strength, as we can of course see from the relative popularity of Zangief in SF4 vs. SF2.
Then again, maybe I have an unusual perspective on the issue, and we're not even talking about 'popularity' in the same sense.
