On the issue of Final Fantasy, this is why we need to be watching the Mario Basketball website very carefully. If you go to the charactor page on the website, you'll see there's a third page but it hasn't been added yet. Since it'll be the last page to be revealed, the charactors on the last pages are usually the big secret charactors that suprise people.
If Cloud is revealed to be one of those charactors, then I'm afraid he has a good chance of appearing in Brawl. The requirement is the charactor must have appeared on a Nintendo console, and if Cloud is in Mario Basketball then he's offically appeared on a Nintendo console in a playable form and they can use that as a reason to include him.
Now Cloud is one of the last charactors I want to appear since I found him to be a very poor charactor but because of the huge popularity he has and how Square is milking FFVII for all it's worth, if there's a way they could get Cloud into Brawl they'd do it.
Let's just hope this doesn't happen though. If there's a Final Fantasy charactor I'd like to see though, it'd be Setzer Gabbiani from FFVI. He was one of my favorite charactors, plus since he fights by throwing cards he'd make a very interesting charactor in Brawl that'd be very unique as well.
There's also the fact that he appeared in Kingdom Hearts 2 which makes him the only pre-FFVII charactor to appear in any of the Kingdom Hearts games. Meaning he's the only Nintendo era Final Fantasy charactor to have appeared in a recent game that was very popular which could help his chances. If Cloud doesn't appear in Mario Basketball then maybe Setzer might actually have a chance. But I wont be getting my hopes up.