When William Penn was first granted his charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, it was basically a big rectangle. The eastern border of Pennsylvania was set as the Delaware River. The southern border was twelve miles north of the existing town of New Castle, extending straight westward. The northern border was set at 43° N latitude. The western border was set at 5° W longitude from the eastern border. That ended up including the source of the Ohio River, where it splits off from the Allegheny, near today's Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but did not extend to the main southern stretch of the Ohio River, that makes up most of the state of Ohio's eastern and southern borders.

Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia's charters, unlike Pennsylvania's, didn't really define a western border. They had northern and southern borders, but no western borders, so those colonies just extended as far west as British North America went. Before the French and Indian War, this was in dispute. The French maintained the border was the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers, but the British maintained that it went beyond that. War broke out after wealthy investors in Virginia formed a real estate venture called the Ohio Company to sell that land. George Washington, the younger brother of one of the investors, was sent to warn the French off the land at the French military outpost of Fort Duquesne, near Pittsburgh. The French refused, and in the middle of the night, Washington ambushed the contingent of French who they'd been negotiating with, and those were the opening shots of the war.

After the war came to a formal end in 1763, the British acquired possession of all of New France, while France retained the Louisiana territory. On paper, that made the new western borders of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia was the Mississippi River. Pennsylvania's western border still remained 5° W longitude from its eastern border.

However, disputes with Indian tribes on the frontier (Pontiac's Rebellion) resulted in the British signing peace treaties with the Indians under which the British continued to agree not to settle the land west of the Ohio River. So, in effect, the borders of Virginia and North Carolina still remained the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio River.

To this end, in 1769, Virginia established Fort Henry at what's now Wheeling, West Virginia, which was as far wast as Virginia was allowed to settle at that point.

After the American Revolution ended in 1783, the new United States government began to make plans to at last allow settlement beyond the Ohio River. Because of the enormous amount of land involved, the new U.S. government asked Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia to relinquish part of their land claims, which they did. Virginia agreed to set their western border as the Ohio River and its tributaries the Tug Fork and Big Sandy River. (Later, part of Virginia was split off to form West Virginia.) North Carolina set its western border as the crest of the Appalachian mountains, north to Virginia and south to Georgia. And Georgia set its western border as the Chattahoochee River, until it ended, and from there a line extended almost directly northward to the Tennessee River.

This was essentially as far westward as any of those colonies, now states, had been allowed to settle before the war ended in 1783, so they set their borders using mostly natural land formations near where their land claims had yet remained unsettled. Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the U.S. Congress began to form this now federally-owned land into separate territories, which then became states.

Sources:

Arthur, John Preston.* Western North Carolina: A History, 1730–1913.* 1914.

Bailey, Kenneth P. "The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792." The History of the Colonial Frontier. 1939.

Russ, William A. How Pennsylvania Acquired Its Present Boundaries. 1966.

Rice, Otis K. West Virginia: A History. 1985.

Stein, Mark. How the States Got Their Shapes. 2008.

For clarification you mean to compare it to the current borders of Virginia? As originally constituted and containing all of present West Virginia it obviously would have left NC as the outlier of the 3.