The answer kind of depends on how old you are. At a very introductory level, say, maybe middle school or younger, it's "okay" to refer to Jupiter as a failed star to get the idea across that a gas giant planet is sort of similar to a star in composition. But around middle school and above (where "middle school" refers to around 6-8 grade, or age ~12-14), I think you can get into enough detail in science class where this is fairly inaccurate.
If you ignore that the solar system is dominated by the Sun and just focus on mass, Jupiter is roughly 80x lighter than the lightest star that undergoes fusion. So it would need to have accumulated 80 times what it already has in order to be a "real star." No Solar System formation model indicates this was remotely possible, which is why I personally don't like to think of it as a "failed star."
Below 80 MJ (where MJ is short for "Jupiter masses"), objects are considered to be brown dwarf stars -- the "real" "failed stars." Brown dwarfs do not have enough mass to fuse hydrogen into helium and produce energy that way, but they do still produce their own heat and glow in the infrared because of that. Their heat is generated by gravitational contraction.
And Jupiter also produces heat through both gravitational contraction and differentiation (heavy elements sinking, light elements rising).
Astronomers are not very good at drawing boundaries these days, mostly because when these terms were created, we didn't know of a continuum of objects. There were gas giant planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, and there were brown dwarf stars, and there were full-fledged stars. The line between brown dwarf and gas giant - to my knowledge - has not been drawn. Personally, and I think I remember reading somewhere, the general consensus is that around 10-20 MJ is the boundary between a gas giant planet and brown dwarf, but I think it's fairly arbitrary, much like what's a planet vs. minor planet, Kuiper belt object (KBO) or asteroid.
So during Solar System formation, was there a chance Jupiter could have been a star and it failed ("failed star!") because the mean Sun gobbled up all the mass? Not really, at least not in our solar system. But for getting the very basic concept across of going from a gas giant planet to a star, calling Jupiter a "failed star" can be a useful analogy.
They are sometimes also called double planets and they're more widespread in fiction than in observations. I don't think that there is any new instability that would appear for the system of double planets orbiting a star and that wouldn't be present for other, more asymmetric pairs of planets. Obviously, the tidal forces would be really large if the planets were close enough to each other. But because the tidal forces go like $1/r^3$, it's enough to choose the distance that is 5 times larger than the Earth-Moon distance and the tidal forces from the other Earth would be weakened 125 times and would already be as weak as they are actually from the Moon now (with a lower frequency).
One must realize that the systems with two or several planets are rather rare and the condition that the mass of the leading two planets is comparable is even more constraining.
Imagine that each of the two planets has a mass that is uniformly distributed between 1/20 of Earth's mass (like Mercury) and 300 Earth masses (like Jupiter) on the log scale. The interval goes from the minimum to the maximum that is 6,000 times heavier. That's more than 12 doublings, $2^{12}=4,096$. So if you pick the first planet to be at a random place on that interval of masses (uniformly at the log scale), the probability that the second planet's mass (which is independent) differs by less than the factor of $\sqrt{2}$ from the first mass is about $1/12$.
Only $1/12$ of systems that look like a pair of planets will be this symmetric. And the number of pairs of planets - even asymmetric ones – is rather low, indeed. The reason is really that during the violent eras when Solar-like systems were created, rocks had large enough velocities and they flew in pretty random directions so they were unbound at the end. It's just unlikely to find two large rocks in the same small volume of space: compare this statement with some high-temperature, high-entropy configurations of molecules in statistical physics.
It's also rather unlikely that a collision with another object creates two objects that will orbit one another. After all, the two-body orbits are periodic so if the two parts were in contact during the collision, they will collide again after one period (or earlier). Equivalently, the eccentricity of the orbit is likely to be too extreme which will lead to a fast reunification of the two new planets. Moreover, even if something would place the two newly created planets from a "divorce" on a near-circular orbit, perhaps a collision with a second external object (good luck), it's very unlikely that such an orbit will have the right radius, like the 1 million km I was suggesting in the case of the hypothetical double Earth above. If the two objects are too close, the tidal forces will be huge and (at least for some signs of the internal angular momentum) they will gradually make the planets collapse into one object again. And if the energy with which the planets are ejected from one another is too high, no bound state will be created at all. So the initial kinetic energy of the newborn 2 planets would have to be almost exactly tuned to their gravitational potential energy (without the minus sign) and that's generally unlikely, too.
Best Answer
For your first question, a requirement for a solar system is that there must be at least one star contained within it. Without a star or some other intense gravity field holding the planets in orbit, the planets would drift away. It is possible for any class of star- from dwarf to supergiant- to hold planets in orbit and therefore have a solar system.
Current technology cannot identify magnetospheres around exoplanets due to our limited processes. However it is reasonable to assume that a planet in the habitable zone of a star may possess a magnetosphere.
A planet's magnetosphere is dependent not on a star, but on the rotation of that planet's core. Earth's core rotates within the mantle, creating our supposedly unique magnetosphere. The only real interaction between a star and a planet's magnetosphere is the magnetosphere deflecting solar winds from the star.