Will I be forced to view a stretched image, or am I able to play it in a window that's of decent enough size so I don't have to squint while playing?

Stretched image? With my ATI on board chip I can set my ATI software to play any game in widescreen for my laptop and there is no squinting. It will force the widescreen and there is no difference in the way the widescreen looks vs setting a native widescreen resolution in the game. None whatsoever. You should not have to squint to see anything. Play with your settings for your card ATI or Nvidia, you may find a better setting that will fix this for you.