How can I replace one term in an R formula with two?

You can use the substitute function for this

substitute(y ~ b*x + z, list(x=quote(x_part1 + x_part2)))
# y ~ b * (x_part1 + x_part2) + z

Here we use the named list to tell R to replace the variable x with the expression x_part1 + x_part2

You can write a recursive function to modify the expression tree of the formula:

replace_term <- function(f, old, new){
  n <- length(f)
  if(n > 1) {
    for(i in 1:n) f[[i]] <- Recall(f[[i]], old, new)

    return(f)
  }

  if(f == old) new else f
}

Which you can use to modify eg interactions:

> replace_term(y~x*a+z - x, quote(x), quote(x1 + x2))
y ~ (x1 + x2) * a + z - (x1 + x2)

How about working with the formula as a string? Many base R models like lm() accept a string formulas (and you can always use formula() otherwise). In this case, you can use something like gsub():

f1 <- "y ~ x + z"
f2 <- "y ~ b*x + z"

gsub("x", "(x_part1 + x_part2)", f1)
#> [1] "y ~ (x_part1 + x_part2) + z"

gsub("x", "(x_part1 + x_part2)", f2)
#> [1] "y ~ b*(x_part1 + x_part2) + z"

For example, with mtcars data set, and say we want to replace mpg (x) with disp + hp (x_part1 + x_part2):

f1 <- "qsec ~ mpg + cyl"
f2 <- "qsec ~ wt*mpg + cyl"

f1 <- gsub("mpg", "(disp + hp)", f1)
f2 <- gsub("mpg", "(disp + hp)", f2)

lm(f1, data = mtcars)
#> 
#> Call:
#> lm(formula = f1, data = mtcars)
#> 
#> Coefficients:
#> (Intercept)         disp           hp          cyl  
#>    22.04376      0.01017     -0.02074     -0.56571

lm(f2, data = mtcars)
#> 
#> Call:
#> lm(formula = f2, data = mtcars)
#> 
#> Coefficients:
#> (Intercept)           wt         disp           hp          cyl  
#>   20.421318     1.554904     0.026837    -0.056141    -0.876182  
#>     wt:disp        wt:hp  
#>   -0.006895     0.011126