SoCal doesn't seem to care much about BBrawl unfortunately. I'm going to be up in Santa Barbara sooner or later and I want to make sure BBrawl gets hyped there this year.
I think Mario is great in BBrawl but is disadvantaged against Falco, Marth, and G&W. Ganondorf is fine except he gets ***** by Mario, Peach, ICs, and Jigglypuff. Link and Yoshi are fun characters that I believe are good contenders.
Top tier is Wolf, Falco, Peach, Pikachu, Zelda/Sheik. Lowest tier (C tier) is Kirby, Ganondorf, Lucas, Lucario, and Bowser. I made some big posts in the BBrawl topic explaining why I believe so and what I think should be changed. In short Kirby gets ***** by Marth, G&W, and to a lesser extent Metaknight offstage. Ganon I explained. Lucas loses zoning badly to Marth, G&W, and Sheik. Lucario now loses to Ganon and a lot of characters since he's actually overrated in vBrawl and didn't get enough buffs imo. Bowser works on the ground but gets juggled and edgeguard by everyone too hard.
I'd bet the WiiU version has identical character data to the 3DS version.
Also if anything does get changed when the WiiU version comes out, I think there'd a patch for the 3DS version to match it.