You are right, it doesn't imply anything at all. It is one of the most vague sentences they could have possibly written. It also does absolutely nothing to exclude them being DLC. Is your argument that DLC characters aren't going to be announced?
And that isn't even my point, my point is that they may not have even known anything about them being DLC or not. The leaker might not have either. They might have just found out that those characters were being worked on as playable characters. Do you honestly believe that Capcom is literally only working on 16 characters at the moment? And once they are done and have released the game they are then going to start getting to work on new characters?