Specifically with the layeredTexture Node the inputs
attribute is actually a pymel method so it returns the input nodes of said node. In order to achieve the desired result you have to declare "layeredTexture1.inputs[1].alpha" as an attribute explicitly via pymel's Attribute()
class or pass it through a pretty handy command pymel has to offer called PyNode()
, which does kind of what you wanted. This should give you everything you should need to know about PyNodes. Some examples of all this would be:
PyNode("checker1").outAlpha >> PyNode("layeredTexture1.inputs[1].alpha") # The whole attr needs to be in the string because of the above explenation.
Attribute("checker1.outAlpha") >> Attribute("layeredTexture1.inputs[1].alpha")
Using PyNode is prefered but you can play around with both.