I kinda see what you're getting at.  But if you are syncing a full node for the first time, you don't need to place trust in any particular node or miner in order to obtain your copy of the blockchain.  Whichever source your node connects to and starts pulling data from, you know it's going to be the same information everyone else has, because that source would be forked off the network if they attempted to alter the data in their copy of the blockchain.  So in that sense, is it not a distributed system?  Just because your client is checking the information it receives to ensure it conforms to certain rules, that doesn't mean your node can operate entirely on its own.  It needs to connect to a network of other peers in order to function.