Even if Apple is playing some word games with lenses with iPhone 17 Pro, I would assume that the quality has to be an improvement over iPhone 16 Pro. (That could be wrong, but if it is, Apple would get a lot of flack.)
I was very impressed by the zoom quality on the 15 Pro Max. If you’ll recall, I posted some samples images on Tidbits Talk:
To me the images are the bottom line, not the terminology or even the hardware.