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Fretless Instruments like the Violin are hard to play for one reason - There are no frets. This means you have to 'find' the notes, On the guitar you have the frets to reference where the notes are - Just about all instruments have strong indicators of where a tone is, On the violin its more like 'somewhere around here'.. How the tones lay out on a string instrument (fretted or fretless) are similiar, If you were to put frets on a violin then you would follow the same formula as you would for the guitar.

Here is a flash diagram that uses a fret placement formula to show how they would actually look like, If you divide the string into four equal parts then that would be where the 5th, 12 and 24th frets would be: You can drag the bridge to see that the formula is the same no matter what the string length of the instrument is...

The diagram above shows what your 'fingerboard' would look like if it had lines for where the tones are, The effect is that the farther down the neck you go, the closer the notes get to each other... The 'nightmare' with fretless instruments is finding the tones, Its hard enough to learn the scales with frets so taking away the frets makes it ten times harder...

On the guitar you have 12 tones and on the fretless instruments you have all of the tones which include the 'Microtones' (24+ tones)...