Seems consistent to me:

.match, .search and .finditer return a MatchObject whose .group() return the *entire matched string*. If you use .group(1) you'll get similar results to .findall() which returns a list of (possibly of tuples) of the captured groupings.

This is the findall equivalent (using a non-capturing group):

>>> re.findall('a(?:b)?', 'ab')
['ab']