It's actually sort of confusing. There is a lot of posts out there, including from official SWTOR sites that don't tell the whole story. Most of them suggest that there aren't inherit stats. Which is sort of true, but not totally:
From SWTOR Stats & Attributes:
Due to the extreme amount of gear customization in TOR, developers
want you to be able to take any orange item (orange = fully moddable)
and use it all the way to max level if you prefer. In order to achieve
this, weapons and armor both have a dynamic stat on them which changes
based on the level of the mods you have placed inside the item.
- Rating – Increases the damage done on a weapon. You’ll see this listed
at the very top of a lightsaber or blaster’s tooltip. The stat itself
does absolutely nothing except increase the damage done — think of it
as the ‘item level’ stat you’re used to seeing in games like World of
Warcraft.
- Armor – Armor, which you should be more familiar with,
increases Energy and Kinetic resistances (more on that later), is the
dynamic stat increased on pieces of equipped gear.
So, for an example, if you take an orange lightsaber with all level 1
mods in it, compared to the same lightsaber with all level 10 mods in
it, the Rating stat will be much higher, and thus so will it’s damage.
Same goes for Armor on those pieces with Armor on them.
(Which is a good summary from this really long SWTOR.com forum thread that did have an op post in it that clarified the situation to what we know now.)
The op explained that this dynamic stat is important so that modded items can drop from bosses on instance and still have some inherit value so that the first boss in an instance isn't farmed over and over for only the mod pieces.
The above SWTOR.com thread also discusses one important bug that is confusing a lot of people. If you do not equip the weapon/armor or relog after modifying it, the tooltip will not accurately reflect all the correct stats based on this dynamic stat modifier. Depending on what you change, when, and what is in it now, the numbers in the tooltip can be a lot higher or lower than they really are.
UPDATE:
Some additional clarification from the official devs:
Orange Armor gets it's armor value from the 'armoring' mod you slot
in. If you exchange it for something better, the armor value increases
along with the stats.
It's always the first mod in the list that determines the intrinsic
properties of the orange items (e.g. armoring on armor, barrel on
guns, etc.)
Starting with late beta, companions share your alignment. I remember I switched from neutral to full light, and suddenly a bunch of items my companions were using couldn't be used anymore since they said 'forbidden for light I and above', even though it was my companions who were using them
Best Answer
I've been able to spot people significantly higher-level than me in low level warzones (10 or more level gaps); this makes me believe that your effective level in your example would be 55 (60 now) and thus the stealth checks would be that of a level 55 spotting a level 55.