would you say someone using only blogger, wordpress, livejournal, and typepad could still make a decent amount of money from adsense, do any of you have success stories using any one of these blog sites?
It's not about the platform you use. It's about the quality of your postings that will make that difference between failure and success.
I use blogger for one of my blogs and I have been successful with it (in the tune of $10/day.) I find that if your provide good content people don't care much about where you are hosting your blog. If you are looking to get started at 0 (zero) cost until you figure out what works and what doesn't, blogger (and the others) are a perfect choice.
Wordpress is a non-starter with AdSense because it requires all sorts of special widgets and things to get it working. Blogger definitely can be successful in terms of AdSense. Not only is it very easy to insert and optimise your ads but you can attract a decent amount of traffic too. A chap on here was trying to sell a football Blogger blog a few days ago and he claimed to make several thousand per month - he also provided traffic stats showing about 10K uniques per day.
With no startup costs then blogger is the best. You can't use adsense on wordpress.com. I perfer Wrodpress, but for a beginner it has a learning curve, but still the only real option for wordpress is to host it on your own domain and site. So you need to pay for hosting to go this route. I have never used either of the other ones, but I've heard good things about them all.