I have read that both here and elsewhere. Is there anything about Sonar that benefits guitarists more than other DAWs?

Well for one it has a guitar fret in the Staff View.

Guitar Tracks Pro which is a lite version of Sonar is an easy way to get started and at some point upgrade.

Many of the CW people play the guitar as well.

I like Guitar rig which comes with Sonar.
Craig Anderton wrote a book about Guitarists guide to sonar.

Hmmm...that seems to ring true I guess. Have a friend who does R&B stuff and he is all into FL Studio. He started out in Sonar but moved over when the guys he would collaborate with were using something else. A friend (who is a guitarist) was using Sonar (I was planning on Cubase) and since I could get his help I jumped on Sonar after using a VS2480. Then Roland joined me in Sonar;-)

It's simple?  No, that would be for bassists.

I would venture it is for a couple of combing reasons.  One, it is PC.  No need for a special, expensive Mac.  If you have an internet laptop Cake will work.   And it was pretty cheap to get into back when. In 2003 I got a free copy of Plasma w/ computer music. So the cost for getting into was cheap if you had a home computer and wanted to do some recording.  A couple of hundred bucks and you had a better system than several thousand could have bought in the analog days - you needed to spend about two grand each on a reel to reel and board to get into consumer sound.

And Cake/SONAR is a pretty simple DAW - it was easy enough for me to switch from a Yamaha CX5M and its basic sequencer program in the days of yore. 

@

It sounds like it's pretty accidental then, well maybe apart from the Guitar Rig and Guitar Tracks Pro part. 

I actually have a hard time getting a decent straight ahead guitar sound out of Guitar Rig....I mean I can do it...eventually....but there is so much that's unusable there as well. I actually like it best for some of the far-out effects it has. I can sit for hours with a preset like Granular Sparkle or Moloching and have the time of my life, but whenever I try to get a decent blues or 70's rock sound I'm never quite satisfied. I have an American Telecaster which sounds great through a good amp (in fact I can't get it to sound bad) but through an amp simulator...hmm. 

Sometimes when using a DAW though, I forget that I'm a pretty capable guitarist. I'll sit there lamenting that Komplete Ultimate doesn't have decent guitar library, then all of a sudden think "you dope, just play it yourself!"

AT

And Cake/SONAR is a pretty simple DAW - it was easy enough for me to switch from a Yamaha CX5M and its basic sequencer program in the days of yore. 

I only got into using DAWs relatively recently. Before that, the last computer music making I did was using OctaMED on the Amiga (which looks pretty similar to the original DOS Cakewalk...columns of numbers etc). I was actually pretty shocked at how much more there was to it when I hooked up with Pro Tools years later. Especially on the mixing and automation side. I think I'd probably find Sonar quite complicated if it was the first modern DAW I'd used....but after having been immersed in Pro Tools for a while, I'm finding the learning curve to be quite shallow (i.e. was making music with it after a couple of hours). Mastering a DAW, however, is another matter entirely. 

Seems everyone and their brother play guitar. 
A lot of them have a PC. 

Sonar - and other Cakewalk products - work on the PC, offer some affordable solutions and are relatively easy to use.

Speaking from experience as a guitar player, I wouldn't have touched a computer before I heard one playback a multitrack audio mix in the late 90s. The program was Cakewalk Pro Audio 6 if I remember correctly. So I bought a PC because I wanted "that".

My keyboardist friends had been working w/ Ataris, Amigas and other computers for years by then - and as such, they'd been exposed to early versions of Logic and Cubase. Though Cakewalk effectively dates back to the early 90s, Ataris were still a platform of choice for musicians. 

Which may explain why many keyboardists naturally gravitated towards Logic and Cubase. 

I'm not a guitarist (I can play guitar, but don't consider myself a *guitarist*) and I've noticed this since the old Cakewalk Pro Audio days. First of all, it's a cultural factor. Sonar is the only major American-made sequencer DAW (Pro Tools, though also American-made, doesn't count, since MIDI sequencing was added on as an afterthought later on, and Apple's Logic was originally made by German company Emagic), and Americans, generally speaking are more into guitars and rock & roll (and country too), whereas the Europeans are more into electronic/dance music, and thusly gave the world Cubase, (the original) Logic, Reason and Ableton Live. Second of all, mainly because of those cultural reasons, it was heavily marketed towards guitar players (take a look at most of the advertisements for Sonar; nearly all of them depict guitar players). As an electronic musician in the '90s, though I was a devoted CWPA/Sonar user, the lack of certain features at the time was sort of frustrating, but I learned to work around those limitations. Eventually Sonar caught up, though maybe too late for most electronic musicians/producers, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, to take notice. Third, it's got a guitar tuner built in for goodness sakes!

With regard the geographical and historical aspects, I guess it could have something to do with the fact that DOS based PC's weren't often used outside of an office setting in Europe in the 80's and early 90's. I'm based in the US but grew up in Britain, and back then if you had a computer in your home it was either Sinclair, Commodore or Atari. I remember buying American computer magazines and seeing ads for DOS based games and thinking wow, do kids really have those "officey" computers in their homes in the US? 

Home PC use only really took off with the advent of Windows 95 and Pentium. I remember a couple of people I knew using Cubase on Windows, whereas most people had previous used Atari's or Amiga's.