Tanks have a place of fascination in popular history because, well, they're kind of cool. They're big, they have powerful cannons and thick armor, and they're visually distinctive. It's quite easy to identify a Nazi tank vs. a Soviet tank vs. an American tank, for instance - the famous tanks of each of the major combatants have very distinctive visual differences, in a way that small arms or artillery don't quite. With that said, I think we have to draw a line between popular and academic history. Academic history, by and large, doesn't obsess over the exact technical characteristics of individual weapons the way that popular history tends to, and so within more serious academic texts I don't think you see the same technical emphasis on tanks or planes that you might see in popular histories.

There is another aspect to the tank question specifically, though, which relates to the matter of historiography or the study of the study of history, and the obsession of much English-language war history with the Nazi Wehrmacht. For much of the post-WWII period, English-language writing on the war had a notable bent in favor of the Wehrmacht. In large part this is the result of the US Army's heavy use of testimony and memoirs from Nazi officers for understanding Soviet tactics and doctrine during the late 40s and 50s, but also from the widely-publicized and disgustingly self-congratulatory memoirs of Nazi officers. Many of these memoirs were from tank commanders like Otto Carius, in which the technical superiority of German tanks like the Tiger was inflated to frankly absurd degrees. So, gripping (if fictitious) accounts of armored warfare, written in the context of a cottage industry of hagiographic, self-promoting memoirs and shoddy scholarship on the Wehrmacht, quite likely contributed to the apparent focus on tanks in popular history. Smelser and Davies' The Myth of the Eastern Front is a very eye-opening examination of the phenomenon of Wehrmacht glorification and its effects on the academic and popular histories of the war.