Your value won't work because an inputText control's value expression must be an lvalue. That means if you can't place the value of the left-hand side (before the "=") of an assignment statement, it's not valid.
You can obtain (and modify) the values of the core
JSF controls on the client's browser using client-side code, since the default HTML renderer converts them into ordinary HTML controls. However, accessing them is a little more complicated that accessing straight HTML, since the id attributes of the generated HTML isn't the exact same value as the id you code on the JSF. The generated HTML ids are composites of the JSF ID plus the IDs of the containers that surround it such as the h:form object.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.