awblain
Back to the original question that started the thread: the engine's thrust is produced by accelerating the mass of air arriving at the intake and ejected from the exhaust.
When other replies say 'xxx generates yyy% of the thrust', they're not saying it generates thrust independently, out of nowhere; they're saying that of the thrust created by the engine, yyy% appears as an unbalanced force at component xxx. If you assume a pylon mounted engine, you still end up with a couple of bearings whose job is to convey that total unbalanced force (the engine thrust) to the airframe.
How does an inlet generate force? (ie how does an unbalanced force appear at or about the inlet components?). The purpose of the inlet is to slow down the air to a velocity that the compressor/fan can accept. In slowing down the air a (more or less) adiabatic compression takes place (ie a compression without any energy being added to the airflow). If the duct is just a cylinder, no unbalanced force will result; but if the duct has a profile that is narrower at the front (inlet) than the rear, a net forwards force will be generated. (The only way I can think of to explain this is if you simplify the inlet profile so that there's a step reduction in diameter, it's clear then that the higher static pressure of the air inside the inlet is pressing on the face of that step with a greater pressure than the air outside, resulting in a forwards force. That's still not a very good description... I think I've reached the limits of what I can easily explain without taking more time, text and mathematics. I'm pretty sure no-one would read that, and I can't be bothered writing it.)
The faster you go, the more the speed of the incoming air has to be reduced, and the higher the relative proportion of thrust will appear at the inlet. But this only happens because of the engine behind the inlet.
No perpetual motion required.
And all of this is only really relevant to the airframe designer, so that he knows why size bolts to use to hold the thing together. The engine is still the thing that produces thrust (I suppose you could say 'the engine installation' to make the point that the successful use of an engine is highly dependent on the inlet and exhaust arrangements).
If you're really interested, there are books (I mentioned a couple earlier in the thread, before getting thoroughly cheesed off with pointless, wrongheaded Gedanken experiments). Read those rather than trusting the highly variable quality of explanations available in internet forums (my explanations included!). These are matters of plain engineering fact, not opinion.