Three pages and too many quotes to save...
Ok first, about Pikachu being an all-round character, technically he was one in Melee also. Sure he can run fast but really he was only fast because he was very easy to play fast. Characters like Fox are fast but when played by extremely good players pretty much double in speed. That's the character difference.
Fox's Assault design looks like crap at two points for me, the shiny red red shoes and the armor like vest with the shoulder pads. It makes sense since in the game he's supposed to get mixed up in ground combat, so he gets an armor like suit. They changed his vest for Brawl and made his boots look like leather, and as we all agree, he looks much better.
Character roster-wise, I expect at least the 14 that you start out with in Melee to make it, meaning Mario, Pikachu, Link, Zelda/Sheik, Captain Falcon, Samus, Ness, Kirby, Ice Climbers, Yoshi, Peach, Bowser, Donkey Kong and Fox.
Then you have to add in the characters that will probably be secret characters again. There's already Luigi and Jigglypuff, but I'm going to add in a few others for speculation: Marth, Falco (if for some reason Falco gets cut, they're definitely adding Krystal), a Pokemon (not necessarily Mewtwo or Pichu, although I'd like to see Mewtwo again with a buff), Gannondorf (hey, he'll probably get a new moveset!), and I hope to god to have Game&Watch again. He was an awesome surprise joke character.
Now, I'm thinking Sakurai wants to do the same thing he did in Melee and increase the roster for each world a little. Kirby and Samus already get their world's update with Metaknight and Zero-Suit Samus. Yoshi still can't really have an update. Mario might gain another character besides Wario (especially since Wario even has his own emblem, like Yoshi), although I'm hesitant to guess (if it's going to be a clone, it would be cool to have Shadow Mario complete with the paintbrush). No one else from Ness' world is as iconic as Ness himself still, blame lack of Mother ports in the US. Donkey Kong may finally have Diddy Kong in there, Fox will more than likely have Krystal, G&W has to be secret again, Link/Zelda/Gannondorf is fine enough in my opinion, and Ice Climbers don't have anything else. I wonder if Fire Emblem will receive anymore characters...
Counting this all up that's about 20-25 characters from existing worlds that are more than likely to make it. Melee had 11 secret characters, so there's probably going to be at least 10 again, but then again, I just named about 6 characters being secret characters. And then there are the 3rd party wild cards. At this point any other speculation would pretty much go groundless.
But we could also expect at least 30 characters right? I just hope they do like Melee and the character select screen changes as characters are unlocked. It keeps you guessing on who will be unlocked next.
And I hope they bring back the unlocking characters through number of multi-player matches. Compared to 6 years ago, I'm in a much better position to take advantage of the that.
Then again, I'd prefer stages to be like this. Those were always harder to unlock.
This should give us something to discuss until tomorrow.