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Unnamed comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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I believe that Konrad Lorenz was the first one to advance the evolutionary theory of cuteness. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article about it (pdf) using Mickey Mouse as an example (don't be dissuaded by the author's identity). Lorenz argued that we respond with awwwws and nurturing behavior to features that distinguish infant humans from adults, like large round heads, large eyes, small pudgy limbs, and clumsy movements, even if they belong to another animal or a nonliving thing.
There has been research on why animals are cute, again going back to Lorenz, and I think it's generally accepted that the young of many species are cute to us because they share cute-inducing features that are common to that developmental stage, some species (like pandas) seem cute just because out of the wide variety of species some of them happen to have cute-inducing features, and some species (like dogs) seem cute because humans have bred them that way. I'm not sure if there is research on whether adults of other species find their own young to be cute.
Human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time, which helps explain why humans are so attuned to cuteness (and why there would be a bias towards over-identifying instances of cuteness, which evolutionarily is the less costly error). That doesn't explain why bunnies are cuter than babies, though, or why non-humans dominate the top of our cutest list. Perhaps they just have more of the cute-inducing features. Humans occupy a small portion of body-space, and if you move from the region occupied by adult humans to the region occupied by human infants and then go even further along the same dimensions, you could run into regions occupied by other animals. But why would this happen for cuteness but not sexiness?
This is a rewrite of my comment as more of an argument and less links and speculation, since I think that parts of it might be clearer that way.
Lorenz's theory is that humans evolved to respond with an awwww to the features that distinguish infants from adults, and so we also awwww to other animals that have those features. Why do other species have features that we find cute? One reason is that we've exerted selection pressure on them - for instance, by being more friendly to cuter wolf/dogs. A second is that features common among mammal young naturally became features of human babies, so of course other baby animals have some cute-inducing features. A third is that features that differ between babies and adults also tend to differ between different species, and so there will be some species that have the baby-like version of those features or even a more extreme version. Babies are smaller than adults but some species are smaller; babies have small less-protruding noses but some species have smaller noses; babies have small limbs relative to their body but other species have smaller ones; babies are soft but some species are softer.
Bunny superiority may just be a result of there being enough species so that some will have a large enough collection of extreme cute-inducing features to be super-adorable. And since our ancestors don't seem to have wasted a ton of fitness on cute non-humans, they didn't undergo a strong evolutionary force to prevent the bunny takeover.