Let me answer the questions as best as I can, relative to my situation.
I think it is entirely possible to get up to speed in three months, normally, with web services. The basic concepts are easy enough to grasp, and it's a matter of both getting some practice with the technologies and learning the bits and pieces you don't ordinarily use. It might be a bit tight, if you only have three hours per day to dedicate to it (on top of whatever else is going on), but I think it is entirely possible to get the needed proficiency.
I'd offer suggestions for materials, save that I did my studying during the Beta period, and ended up having to chart my own course. That said, I ended up using
java Web Services Unleashed (SAMS),
SOAP Programming with Java (Sybex) and Java SOAP (WROX) among others, with a healthy dose of sitting around and playing with Apache Axis to get a feel for the technologies. (I'm sure I had other books I referred to, but they're not at the office for me to see them.) You'd probably be better served with someone else here in the forum with more recent experience responding.
As for value... it's what your employer (potential or current) or clients think it's worth. In my case, it gave my client the confidence to let me develop web services in lieu of more complicated solutions to problems, and that alone was worth quite a bit, though financial consideration would have been nice too...
