It’s hard to see how a Creationist could have a decent retort to the information supplied in this chapter

Oh, easy: “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

Seriously, though, your garden variety Creationist, when presented with this evidence, will just wave their hand and say, “That’s not a transitional form!”

If there actually were such a thing as a crocoduck, Comfort and his ilk would simply scoff and say, “Oh yeah? Well show me a half-duck half-crocoduck! THEN I’ll be convinced.”

Which is why it was dumb of Dawkins to even bother say that his audience includes “history-deniers”, because, as you have pointed out, it makes him come across as disingenuous. The target audience for this book ought to be (and IMO is) threefold: Those who are already convinced, so that they will be armed with the proper retorts; “fence-sitters” whose skepticism on evolution is not based in dogma but rather on miseducation; and high school- or college-age Creationists who might actually be susceptible to new ideas.