Good points frogman, but remember, there ARE electric basses without frets. Rick Danko played a fretless Ampeg electric bass in The Last Waltz, and it was a hollow-body ta boot. Jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius played a fretless Fender electric, and if you had called it a bass guitar to his face you would have shortly thereafter seen his fist heading towards YOUR face!
Most electric bassists DO play it with the neck straight out, almost parallel with the floor, but think back to the early Stones; Bill Wyman played his Framus hollow-body electric with the neck and headstock pointing up at the ceiling, like a stand-up. There are pictures from the 1950’s of the early Blues bassists playing the new electric basses, having just switched over from their stand-ups; the electrics were easier to lug around the country on road trips. Some of them were playing their electrics as if they were acoustics, which is, I suspect, why Wyman chose to play his bass in that manner as well.