It's not the models, it's the fact that there is apparently one for every Pokemon and they're all animated. Surely if this was a scrapped feature, they'd know to do it before wasting the time and effort making models for all 800+ characters, right?

The general idea seems to be; why create animated running models of every single character and include them in games that can't use them, unless they were planning ahead and made them for use in a future port that can use them?