"Boolean" operations in Python (ie: the and/or operators)

This method searches for the first group of word characters (ie: [a-zA-Z0-9_]), returning the first matched group or None in case of failure.

def test(str):
    m = re.search(r'(\w+)', str)
    if m:
        return m.group(1)
    return None

The same function can be rewritten as:

def test2(str):
    m = re.search(r'(\w+)', str)
    return m and m.group(1)

This works the same, and is documented behavior; as this page clearly states:

The expression x and y first evaluates x; if x is false, its value is returned; otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned.

However, being a boolean operator (it even says so on the manual), I expected and to return a boolean. As a result, I was astonished when I found out (how) this worked.

What are other use cases of this, and/or what is the rationale for this rather unintuitive implementation?