It will look like a cropped 17-35 lens (because that is exactly what it
is).

However, the distortion is not caused by the lens itself: Suppose you
take two photographs in which you fill the frame with someone's face,
one with a 90mm lens, the other with a 20mm lens (assume 35mm film).
You will of course have to be much closer to do this with the 20mm
lens; as a result, you will get the distortion  you mention. If,
instead, you had taken the photo from the same distance as would fill
the frame with the 90mm lens and then cropped to fill the frame (assume
infinite resolution!), you'd get the same distortion using either lens.

The point is that distortion is caused by the change of perspective
caused by a change of distance, rather than the lens (think about it:
what is hidden by someone's nose depends on where you are looking for,
and on that only: a change of lens cannot have any effect on this).

Anyway, the answer to your question is that if you would have found a
25-52mm lens satisfactory in terms of perspective/distortion, you will
also find the 17-35mm satisfactory

Angle and perspective the crop of a 17-35 on a DSLR and the full
picture of a 25-52 on a 35 mm format will look exactly or almost
the same.

Although a good 17-35 does not distort to much. Because of the
wide angle while taking the picture and the not so wide angle while
viewing the picture, the picture looks distorted when viewing.
But if you view the picture from the correct position, so that the
angles are the same as when taking the picture there is no
distortion.

The wide angle effects of a 17 mm on a DSLR (1.5 crop or zoomfactor),
are less than that on a 35 mm camera.

ben

Yes.

Yes.

The distortion you refer to is a myth.  For pictorial evidence.
see  http://hannemyr.com/photo/crop.html#per .