SQL Server – Can the Account Name of ‘distributor_admin’ Be Changed?

Does an known account name like sa, pose a security threat to database?

A "god" user account with a known name is generally considered a worse idea than a god user with a less well known name. It makes brute force attacks that bit easier as the attacker only has to guess the password and not the username and the password.

Also having a god user anyway can be dangerous. You are generally better off having specific users with specific rights for what they need to do. This sort of privilege based security is easier to implement from scratch than it is to retrofit into your environment later.

Disabling sa and giving specific users specific admin rights as needed in SQL server is essentially the same recommendation as disabling root and handing out admin rights as needed via sudo under Linux and similar. You can always re-enable sa once directly connected to the machine with adequate privileges should anything go wrong and you end up dropping all the rights your users need to operate (and fix the issue) just the same as you can engineer root access to a Linux box if you have physical access to the box - so disabling the account is no magic bullet (but once an attacker has physical access to your machine, or full Administrative access via RDC or SSH, all bets are off anyway).

When using windows authentication on SQL Server does it impose the same password policy(if it was set to say account lockout after 5 times)?

When using Windows Integrated Authentication SQL server has no control over account lockouts and such - it just maps a Windows user to an SQL user and asks the OS to vouch for the fact that the user has provided appropriate credentials. For interactive human users this means any lockout would occur as the user attempted to authenticate with Windows, not as they logged in to SQL Server.

If you are talking about the immediate impact, then the service will need to be restarted in order for that change to take effect. As per TechNet:

When you change the service startup account for the Database Engine and SQL Server Agent, the SQL Server service (the Database Engine) must be restarted for the change to take effect. For more information, see Additional Considerations for Changing Service Accounts below. When the service is restarted, all databases associated with that instance of SQL Server will be unavailable until the service successfully restarts. If you have to change the service startup account of SQL Server or SQL Server Agent, make sure that you do so during regularly scheduled maintenance or when the databases can be taken offline without interrupting daily operations.

Using a domain account as the SQL Server service account is considered best practice, so you are making a step in the right direction.

For further reading, the TechNet reference on Change the Service Startup Account for SQL Server.