The observation that some lines look strange is about as meaningful as the same observation on an any given map projection. It's definitely true, but it all depends on the choice of mapping function, nothing inherent to spherical geometry.
I choose map projections for a particular reason: as has already been pointing out, there's no connection between this "strict" definition and an exponential coordinate transform. Any function mapping the axes that grows faster than polynomial would produce the desired behavior (essentially, you need the ratio between z and x on a line a*x + b*z = c to approach zero or infinity), but would produce different "line" shapes. This choice is entirely arbitrary, and is in fact equivalent to simply mapping the underlying space by a related transformation and then using a normal projective transformation.