You are right, that test "and"s the two operands. But the result is discarded, the only thing that stays, and thats the important part, are the flags. They are set and thats the reason why the test instruction is used (and exist).
JE jumps not when equal (it has the meaning when the instruction before was a comparison), what it really does, it jumps when the ZF flag is set. And as it is one of the flags that is set by test, this instruction sequence (test x,x; je...) has the meaning that it is jumped when x is 0.
For questions like this (and for more details) I can just recommend a book about x86 instruction, e.g. even when it is really big, the Intel documentation is very good and precise.